Google just announced that the mobile version of Google Product Search can now tell you if a certain product is in stock at nearby stores. Currently, Google is only working with a handful of retailers, including Best Buy, Sears, Williams-Sonoma, Pottery Barn and West Elm, but the company is actively looking for more partners. To see these results, just browse to Google.com on your mobile phone (Android, WebOS or Android), click the "more" link and then "Shopping." The local inventory will be updated in real time and is currently only available for users in the U.S.

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Google obviously thinks that providing the best local results possible is the future for a large number of its services. Now that most modern mobile browsers can forward your location data to web apps, it's become even easier for Google to offer these kinds of local results and Google's initiatives around Google Maps and Place Pages show how serious the company is about local search.

For now, with this small number of participating retailers, this isn't necessarily the most useful feature yet. If Google actually manages to get more businesses to use this feature (and/or to expose their inventory through an API), then Google Product Search - which has remained relatively underused - could easily establish itself as the go-to local shopping service.

For more details about the mobile version of Google Product Search, have a look at this video (the introduction of Product Search starts about 19 minutes into the presentation)

Most hosted blogging platforms offer their customers a set of standard templates with relatively few options for customizing these sites. Starting today, however, bloggers on Google's Blogger platform will be able to take full control over the layout of their sites thanks to Google's new Blogger Template Designer without having to edit a single line of HTML and CSS code. The Template Designer will give Blogger's users the ability to change the layout, fonts, colors and background images of their blogs through an easy to use WYSIWYG editor.

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For now, the Template Designer will only be available through Blogger in Draft, Google's experimental section for new Blogger features.

Features

Every template allows users to choose different body layouts with up to four columns. Google partnered with iStockphoto to bring more background images to Blogger. For now, Google won't allow users to upload their own background images yet, but advanced users can always use the CSS code to point to their own images.

In the template designer, users can also change the size and number of the columns on their blogs and edit the design of their blogs' footers.

Change your Color Palette With One Slider

One of the niftiest new features in the Template Designer involves the option to change the complete color palette of your blog with one simple slider. Based on your choice, the application will simply set all the colors of the fonts and other design elements on your site based on your preference while still ensuring readability.

As Siobhan Quinn, Google's product manager for Blogger told us yesterday, Google's users really want to be able to customize their sites and make them look as unique as possible. Just offering a set of rigid templates, Quinn noted, simply isn't enough to give users the feeling that a site is truly theirs. Until now, customizing Blogger sites - while possible - was a bit of a hassle and making any major changed involved editing the HTML and CSS code by hand, which a lot of Blogger's users weren't quite ready to do.

Other blogging platforms like Wordpress.com and TypePad and also allow their users to individualize their blogs to some degree. On Wordpress, however, editing the CSS code comes at a price ($15/year) and unless you are an advanced user, changing the layout of your blog on most hosted blogging platforms is going to involve a steep learning curve.

According to Google, Blogger currently has over 300 million active users and more than 388 million words are published on Blogger every day.

Last week we talked about managing split teams with Danny Wong of Blank Label, a site for creating custom men's dress shirts and a startup in the growing field of co-creation. These types of startups, which have gained more traction overseas than in the U.S., run on a model of on-demand production, which allows them to become cash-flow positive in a relatively short period of time. Wednesday I had the chance to talk about co-creation with Carmen Magar, a German woman living in New York who works for chocri, a German startup that sells customizable chocolates.

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According to Magar, Germany is quickly becoming a hub for co-creation startups while the U.S. and the U.K. have been much slower to adopt them. Before setting up shop in the U.S., custom t-shirt company Spreadshirt actually began as a startup in Germany. Magar, who has spent significant amounts of time in both countries, says that while the difference in cultures has been an influence, the main reason that co-creation has taken off in Germany is the country's smaller market which allows startups to make a larger impact.

"What happened in Germany is that there were a lot of startups doing co-creation; a lot of companies that didn't have a production process in place that were really flexible and could talk to their customers directly," Magar told ReadWriteWeb on Wednesday. "In the U.S., the way it was proselytized was that soon in the future every big company would change their production process to enable mass customization, but that's actually a really risky thing to do. What I think will happen is that the startups, the small companies that are nimble, will lead the way to bring that control to the consumer."

Another reason why co-creation and mass customization may have taken root in Germany is that the country, like many in Europe, suffers from a severe lack of seed level funding, while the U.S. has incubators and VC firms across the country targeting early stage companies. As we mentioned last week with Blank Label, most co-creation startups use a business model that lets them produce products only as they are ordered, keeping costs down and allowing the company to have an early cash flow.

In a region like Europe, the need to bootstrap businesses from the ground up like chocri (which started with €25,000) is much higher, and co-creation is a great way to accomplish this. American startups may be less likely to go down the route of co-creation because the investors are more willing to take risks on less proven businesses.

Magar, who lived in Germany most of her life and came to America to get her MBA, believes that Germany's propensity towards mass customization is also part of what led chocri to hire her as their representative in America. The company just happened to be looking to expand their presence to the U.S. when Magar called to express her interest in the company.

"I think why they chose to have a German on the team is because I saw a lot more of this happen, and I understand more about mass customization," says Magar. "Because I live here I've experienced the American market, but it was more important to them to bring in an understanding of the concept."

This is an important concept for startups to grasp, both in the U.S. and abroad. When looking to expand overseas, it is important to find someone with familiarity in both regions who can survey the new market and who can grasp the core values of your business. As a German, Magar completely understood chocri's co-creation strategy, and studying in America made her a great choice to help the company find a presence there.

Is co-creation finally beginning to catch on in the U.S. with companies like Spreadshirt and Blank Label? Or perhaps co-creation is more alive in America than we realize? Or is mass customization a startup model that will continue its struggle to gain traction in America? Let us know what you think about co-creation and spreading startups overseas in the comments below!

AppleInsider is reporting this morning that some trusted sources are predicting a "full-on solution" to multitasking in the iPhone 4.0 OS, which is set to be released this summer. Already, the iPhone shows that it is capable of multitasking with bundled apps like iPod and Nike+, but the update is said to handle a number of security and interface issues.

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Already, jailbreaking the iPhone shows how the device is fully capable of multitasking, but opens up the device to malware and poorly designed third-party apps that can make a full restore necessary.

As AppleInsider points out, the real benefit of closing off the iPhone to multitasking is that there are no malicious apps running in the background, hijacking your phone. You are, after all, carrying a constantly GPS enabled multimedia recording device with you. At the same time, it would be absolutely wonderful to be able to listen to Pandora while using the MapMyRide app to track your bike ride across town, or any other number of combinations currently unavailable.

But beyond security, AppleInsider discusses the issues of user interface that we might not think of right off the bat. In other operating systems, switching between apps is simple, by way of a taskbar or system dock. On the iPhone, multitasking is often handled by a small strip added at the top of the screen, but this would become messy for multiple applications. Perhaps we'll see a new hardware solution to accompany this issue with the next iPhone "4GS" this summer. And, as Gizmodo points out, if we get multitasking for iPhone, can we really be expected to accept an iPad that can't do the same?

While AppleInsider says that its sources have predicted this "full-on solution", it notes that the much called-for feature has been falsely rumored, by their own articles nonetheless, on three separate occassions over the past year. In addition to this, it says that two of the biggest problems - resource conservation and battery life - were not addressed by their sources. Would we really want these features if it meant a bogged down device we had to charge every hour on the hour? And is this just another case of the boy who cried wolf? Let's hope not.

According to recent data analysis from mobile analytics firm Localytics, iPhone application usage peaks in the evenings and on weekends and is much lower during the hours of a typical business day. From this, the firm concludes that the iPhone is still primarily a personal gadget as opposed to one that's used for business purposes.

But is app usage the true measure of the device's success at making corporate inroads? Or does it just show that people don't play with their iPhone apps while at work?

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In the Localytics study, which mined U.S. and Canadian app usage data for a period of two months, iPhone applications peaked at 9 PM EST during the week and maintained peak usage throughout the weekends. Also on weekends, they found that iPhone users generate 7% more traffic than on weekdays. On Saturdays in particular, app usage traffic starts at a morning low around 6 AM and then hits over 90% of peak usage by 11 AM. On weekdays, however, app usage is more concentrated in the evenings, slowly ramping up during the workday to reach peak usage by 9 PM EST.

Localytics: iPhone is Still More of a Personal Device

In reviewing the results, Localytics believes that the iPhone "continues to be a personal device most heavily used outside of working hours." While we'll agree with their conclusion that these results offer developers insights which can impact their marketing, advertising and promotional strategies, we're not so sure that app usage offers a direct correlation to how much iPhones are used in the workplace. After all, like the Blackberry devices before them, the iPhone's primary work-related task may not be app-related at all - it's probably email and phone calls. And neither of those items, obviously, were tracked in the Localytics study.

iPhones in the Corporate World

Ever since Apple licensed Microsoft's ActiveSync technology for full Microsoft Exchange support back in spring 2008, the Apple smartphone has been slowly gaining ground in the corporate world. In April of last year, for example, Forrester Research presented case studies on three major corporations that had deployed thousands of devices to their customers. The three companies -  Kraft Foods Inc., Oracle Corp. and Amylin Pharmaceuticals Inc. - said that "the benefits of iPhone over other mobile devices include a happier, more productive workforce and lower support costs," noted Forrester analyst Ted Schadler in the report.

A later report, this one by Deutsche Bank analyst Chris Whitmore published in November, said that the iPhone "is making inroads into the Enterprise." Specifically, he estimated that 2 million iPhones would be sold to big businesses by year-end for a total Enterprise market share of 7%, up from 2% in 2008. Whitmore attributed the surging popularity to a combination of four factors: user satisfaction, the onscreen virtual keyboard, enterprise-ready applications and sluggish competition in terms of developer support on other platforms.

Conclusion? iPhones Live in Both Worlds

Although it's probable that iPhones are still used more as personal devices as Localytics suggests, it's clear that business usage is trending upwards.

In order to determine the iPhone's true "business usage," though, we would need to see recent numbers of iPhone deployments in the corporate world in addition to numbers that show how many people use the iPhone's email application for business-related communication purposes. Combined, that data would paint a clearer picture of how little or how much the iPhone is used as a work-related tool. Application usage alone cannot show this.

If you've ever done SXSW before, then you know about the music here in Austin. If you haven't, let us tell you now - there's a lot. But how do you find it all? And how do you find out which show is best? And how do you share blogs, photos, videos and tweet about it all at once?

SuperGlued, which has integrated with both Foursquare and Twitter, will be your your one-stop shop for the more than 1,200 bands that are set to invade Austin over the next week and a half.

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SuperGlued is a can't-miss app for navigating SXSW without having the schizophrenically switch between iPhone apps just to keep up. With the release of a new version of its iPhone app, users can find shows, buy tickets, tweet and read what others are tweeting, post photos and check-in to Foursquare. And if you find yourself at a lame show, the new "Where My Friends At" feature will let you know what shows your friends are seeing so you can ask them if it's any better.

A new partnership with BandsInTown not only helps the service find all the shows going on, but lets you buy tickets from your iPhone. And for special events, like SXSW, Superglued brings all the shows together into a separate event listing.

Aside from the iPhone app, the website lets you continue to interact around the shows you've seen long after they've ended. Rush Doshi, who co-founded SuperGlued with Gawker CTO Tom Plunkett, told us on the phone the other day that SuperGlued is the water cooler for everyone to gather around and talk about that crazy show they saw last week.

"The idea came about from going to a lot of shows and wondering about who else was there - it just seemed that there was no one place to go to see what everyone else thought," said Doshi. "We built SuperGlued to be that place."

SuperGlued connects with Flickr, YouTube, Blogger, Wordpress and Tumblr, so when the shows all over, you can both add and check out blog posts, videos, set lists and more from the website.

Doshi told us that they have made extra efforts to make sure that all of the SXSW shows are list, but if a show isn't there, users can add shows via the website. With the number of shows springing up in parking lots and backyards, this is a must-have feature. In the near future, the company is looking to include show-specific merchandise in its iPhone app, letting you browse and even order show merchandise from your phone and having it shipped to your house.

Beyond SXSW, SuperGlued is available around the world with nearly 200,000 show listings, many of which it pulls from BandInTown and Last.fm, in 140 countries. So, wherever you are, get off your duff, download the iPhone app and go see some live music.

That didn't take long. Leave it to marketers to find a way to use any innovative new web service to promote their own ends. The latest example? A Chatroulette contest launched by international clothing brand French Connection. According to contest rules, participants are asked if they can "conquer the sinister world of Chatroulette" by charming a member of the opposite sex. (Initially, the contest was for men only, but due to protests, the rules were adjusted to permit women the opportunity to try and seduce men, too. Oh joy.)

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According to the initial company blog post about the contest, "if you rise above the seas of failing men and charm a woman on Chatroulette," the company promises to give you a voucher worth 250 pounds which you can spend at the company's retail stores. The blog post then provides an example of what they mean by a "seduction attempt" by way of a screenshot of a Chatroulette chat session - and be warned, it's not what we would consider safe for work. Instead, what French Connection is promoting is essentially a nod to the often perverse nature of the popular webcam-surfing site.

Chatroulette for Marketing: Risky or Brilliant?

Although the French Connection brand may pride themselves on their youthful, hip nature, it's an arguably risky move to promote themselves via a service as odd, off-the-wall, and yes, occasionally very disturbing as Chatroulette. Like Casey Neistat recently explained in a charming video demo of this latest Internet craze, on any given day, Chatroulette is 71% male, 15% female and 14% pervert.

In fact, it's the possibility of running into something odd - or rather someone odd doing something odd- that makes Chatroulette so exciting for its users. Like the game of Russian Roulette from which its name is derived, most of the time nothing remarkable happens - you run into another bored voyeur looking back and you and maybe even have a casual conversation. But every now and then...bang!

And it's the bang that seems to appeal to French Connection. They want to send out their customers into the wild, wild west of Chatroulette to become the very sort of creepy perverts that make the site so darned intriguing. So now, dear Chatroulette users, you'll have to wonder whether that freaky guy/gal hitting on you is doing so because they're actually a weirdo or if they're just trying to win a few bucks to spend at a clothing store.

Thanks to French Connection's bravery, they have the honor of being the first brand to attempt using Chatroulette for marketing purposes. However, if the contest goes well (i.e., it generates a lot of press), other marketers will likely soon follow suit.

Is that a good thing? We're not so sure. At least, it's not good for us, the Chatroulette surfers. Marketers, though, may think it's a downright brilliant move. And maybe it is - after all, who would have thought that anyone could have figured out how to promote a brand on a service like this? Still, we sort of wish the marketers would leave this one alone. Stick to Facebook and Twitter and the other straight-laced social sites of the Internet - leave Chatroulette and all its unrestricted debauchery alone.

Think the semantic web is all hype with no bite? Paul Allen backed semantic startup Evri will announce tomorrow that it has been acquired, we've learned from a reliable source. The service specializes in extracting the names of people, places and things from raw streams of text in order to facilitate smart user navigation and related content recommendation. The company launched a striking new version of its website earlier today.

Evri launched just short of two years ago and raised $8 million from Vulcan, the fund of Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. More interesting than the business side of this story, though, is the technology. Evri brings the semantic and the real-time web together in some very interesting ways.

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Update: According to new reports this morning, Evri wasn't acquired. Instead, Evri acquired Radar Networks. We regret this error.

We profiled Evri as one of 10 intriguing companies in the real-time web space in our recent research report The Real-Time Web and Its Future. Also included was the now Google-acquired Aardvark. (See our coverage: How I Loved and Lost an Aardvark)

Here's how we described the real time part of what Evri does in that report:

Evri is a semantic Web recommendation service for online publishers. The company tracks the real-time Web to know when it needs to create or update a topic page for one of its emerging news topics.

Evri watches news sources to see when a news topic is trending, including articles on Wikipedia that publicly available data shows have leaped in page views. Then it visits structured databases like Wikipedia and FreeBase to check for updates to entries about related entities. It then creates or updates a topic page with news links, photos and Twitter search results. The language used in those Twitter posts is analyzed and the names of news entities in the posts are linked to other Evri topic pages, like pivots.

Evri has done lots of other things as well, including a blog widget, an iPhone app, automated content portals for publishers and a sentiment analysis product. The company didn't see a particularly large amount of hype but was closely watched. Robert Scoble, for example, named Evri one of his top startups to watch for 2010, even a year and a half after it launched.

We haven't been able to identify the company that has acquired Evri yet but the most obvious candidate would be its neighbor and kin Microsoft, where the service would compliment the Powerset team nicely and change the Bing user experience in news search dramatically. Now that we know that Google is working on building a real-time index of the web (our coverage) the prospect of a competitor upping the ante with near real-time semantic parsing, riding on top of real-time indexing, sounds like a hot move.

A number of people have raised the possibility of an Amazon acquisition as well. Evri was also tested out by Yahoo! starting last Fall as a way to facilitate navigation throughout its Sports content pages.

Take that, semantic web doubters.

We'll update this post when the acquiring party is identified. Geeky types interested in an in-depth explanation of Evri's work would be well served by checking out a 6 part video series on YouTube wherein Deep Dhillon, CTO of Evri, discusses the company's technology with students at the Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science & Engineering.

For obvious reasons, we care about what goes on in various parts of the world, particularly New Zealand and other areas that are underserved in terms of Internet access.

So, we were quite excited to learn this evening of a new proposal that would give New Zealanders - including a couple RWW staff members - a better broadband experience. According to NZ website Stuff, a halndful of well-known innovators and entrepreneurs are teaming up on a $900 million dollar project that would give Kiwis (and their Aussie neighbors) "virtually unlimited" broadband access via an international cable that would run across the Pacific Ocean. Just how much of a difference would this cable make compared to current Internet access?

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The difference would be significant, as Stuff's graphic shows:

The plan is to construct a 5.12 Terabits per second-capacity fiber cable to connect Australia and New Zealand to the U.S. - a cable that would deliver data at five times the speed of the current network.

This proposal puts Warehouse founder Stephen Tindall, TradeMe creator Sam Morgan, entrepreneur Rod Drury, and techies Mark Rushworth, John Humphrey and Lance Wiggs in competition head-to-head with Southern Cross Cable, a large network partially owned by Telecom New Zealand. The team, called Pacific Fibre, hopes to complete the project by 2013.

Of course, the next step is figuring out the exact cost of the proposed cable - the group thinks $900M might be a highball figure - and find investors. However, as Tindall eloquently noted, you have to spend money to make money - something anyone with an interest in NZ's economic future and global competitiveness must consider.

"The New Zealand Institute identified billions of dollars in economic potential by unleashing the Internet," he said, "and it is beyond time to address the issue. This is necessary and basic infrastructure - we must decrease the distance between New Zealand and the international markets.

"Doing so will be incredibly valuable for New Zealand and Australian businesses and consumers. If we are able to deliver on this cable this it could be as valuable to our NZ economy as the quantum leap refrigerated ships were to our export trade many years ago."

How feasible do you think this project will be? Is 2013 a realistic time table? And where do you think Pacific Fibre's investors will be found? Let us know your opinions in the comments.

When it comes to tech conferences, the first thing most people think about is the parties.

They might think about networking opportunities or learning experiences, but all too often, these are brushed off as mutual admiration societies and redundant, unoriginal chatter. I've heard every critique imaginable about some of the best-known tech conferences

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The greatest thing I've ever gotten out of conferences is friendship - mutually beneficial, educational friendship. And the greatest task a conference organizer can hope to accomplish - swag, parties and panels be damned - is getting the right people into the same set of rooms so those friendships can be formed.

Aside from the pure serendipity of meeting new people (or meeting online friends in real life), I have found that the main benefits of conferences are those I create for myself.

In other words, when I have complained that the content was boring, I am to be blamed for not seeking out content that was interesting or, in a single-track show, for not participating in the conversation and helping to make it more interesting for me and my fellow attendees. When we say that a given show is good for nothing but parties, well, that's a pretty good sign that partying is more of a priority for us than gaining real value. If we say a conference is populated by "the same old douchebags," as one person recently said to me, then perhaps we're not taking the time to socialize and network outside our zone of comfort and familiarity.

To be blunt, bad attendees make bad conferences. An engaged, interesting and curious person can go to the exact same show and, in most cases, can derive huge benefits from it though a little effort and a lot of great attitude. There's no show too big, too small, too boring for that person to not be able to learn something from it.

What do you think? Have you ever been to a truly, in-and-of-itself bad conference? Would a shift in your own focus have helped? How would you characterize the best conferences of your career to date? Let us know your opinions in the comments.

As the cloud is getting more players and interfaces, best and worst practices are emerging. As the market grows and more companies try to plug in, the cloud may benefit from guiding principles.

Similar to new technology movements in the past, a natural process is underway to define "what is good", which, for some in the industry, equates to "what is open". Like religion itself, open can be defined in ways that are uplifting, or on the other side of the coin, restricting. Also, we learn again, nothing is free.

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Cloud APIs Must Walk on Water

If you've been part of a software development project, you know that sometimes it's hard to get the team to all agree on best practices for interface design, database optimization, or even what technology to use. In this analysis, we take a look at some of the movements in cloud computing that start to lay a framework of good as it relates to this technology.

In this context, API designers for cloud applications need to think ahead and avoid common pitfalls. For several reasons, more than ever before. First, because many people will be accessing your one piece of code. Second, is that in this world of open APIs, it's easy to compare your code against another.

We notice that data management practices are at the core, and details matter when provisioning in platforms. At the same time that groups are forming to align practices and forms of virtualization and cloud standards, a voice whispers that perhaps this is a free-market problem. People who benefit at solving it, will; others will ignore it or compete directly. We enjoyed this post from Joyent on where standards matter in a practical sense.

In essence, the question raised: If a vendor makes it easy and bakes in the ability to "just do it", do you know or care about the standards? This seems to mirror an iPhone development paradigm, which is to expect work from the vendor SDK or libraries. The SDK wraps standards implementations, which is done in the way best understood by that vendor.

Do Unto Others as You Would Have Done To You

We know the cloud is big - perhaps it will inevitably be bigger than the Internet itself as it usurps our conception of location, space and time.

Where power forms, rules, groups, and organizations do as well. In information technology there is always tension between open standards and defacto standards. The former are crafted through agreements, the latter through leadership and market dominance.

We asked in a prior series "Will a single company become the dominant provider in the cloud?" Today we look at the more practical side of "who is winning now" - who is setting the rules and who is in the trenches.

Quite a number of the responses to our earlier posts emphasized that "the cloud should be free", meaning that it should have governing principles to avoid one vendor from owning the landscape.

Here are a few groups that have emerged to provide some context in how this may come together, both philosophically and practically. In both, the devil is in the details. A good summary of some of the current combining of forces is by the Open Grid Forum. (In our opinion, grids have given way to clouds as the dominant concept in this technology makeover).

• A resource directory of initiatives is located at the Cloud Standards Wiki, which in itself was formed by a handful of organizations and movements working to align around setting rules and patterns for cloud computing.
• The Open Cloud Consortium is organized around developing practices around sharing resources and has recently focused on a developing a test bed.
• The DMTF is working at the core definition of virtualization. It recently focused on the 1.1 version of the Open Virtualization Format (OVF) specification that focuses on packaging virtualization instances and creating a portable mechanic distribution by defining envelope and collection parameters around the virtual machine and its services. The organization, which contains members of IBM, Microsoft, Dell, VMware, XENSource, Sun, and NEC, has submitted 1.1 for consideration as an ANSI and ISO standard.
• The efforts by the federal government in its data.gov initiative shows that there's a market that's starting to see the value of raw government data formats. Soon, we would expect this to be powered by a mesh of computer resources that allow all sorts of jobs - integrated jobs - to work with these data sets. It would comprise an active government cloud.

Do Not Covet Thy Neighbors Network Resource

When looking for things to avoid, we found a lot of philosophical questions around data ownership, logging and portability. These discussions are alive and well and seem to be being absorbed into vendor solutions and consortiums like the ones mentioned earlier.

For a more practical view, we turned to a friend of ReadWriteWeb, Thorsten von Eicken, and have summarized his thoughts from a recent post, "Top Cloud API Sins. Bold items are our (loose) mapping to biblical terms.

• Do not covet your neighbors resources.: Listing of resources without the details, e.g., a list-servers call that doesn't return all the details for each server. This makes it very expensive to poll for server state changes ...


• Do not make cast idols: Not returning a resource id on creation. Some APIs don't give you a server i.d. when you request a server...


• Labor six days, rest on the seventh: Providing a task queue. Several APIs I've seen have a task queue that is supposed to provide updates on tasks that are in progress E.g., you launch a server and you get a handle onto a task descriptor. For us that's just overhead...


• Though shall not bear false witness: Not returning deleted resources in a "list resource" call. In particular, terminated servers must be returned in a list servers call for a certain duration, probably at least for an hour. Ouch!...


• Shall not covet his neighbor (or force me to repaginate): Pagination that goes page-wise instead of using a marker, e.g. where you get page one or the first 100 resources and then issue a query for "page 2″ or "from 100 on". Explain to me how a client can get a consistent resource listing when resources can be added and removed concurrently...


• Randy Bias added to Torsten's post: Treat others as you want to be treated Your UI MUST use your API so you understand how to be a consumer of your own API...

We plan on keeping up with this list and seeing how it intersects with implementations and standards that evolve.

Nirvana: Smells Like Services Orientation

Torsten goes on to describe a picture of the future. "Now here's what I'd really like to see. This is what we're working on for internal purposes and it's not easy, which is an event based interface instead of a request-reply based interface... "

Smart services in the cloud, rather than resources alone. This starts to get us closer and closer to an object-orientated network. Maybe that's what the cloud will be for platforms, infrastructure and software. The industry has been quick to identify the layers. But perhaps the point is piecing them together in a smart transactional framework.

A way to engineer highly reliable systems around these architecture challenges may sound familiar to those who monitor existing data centers today.

Torsten continues, "We run a good number of machines that do nothing but chew up 100% cpu polling EC2 to detect changes. Fortunately cpu cycles are cheap :-)".

This is practical intervention between vision and get it done.

We find it refreshing to hear this type of dialog in the industry and see a fresh opportunity for defining efficient patterns for this next generation of the cloud infrastructure.

Perhaps a new concept is forming: "Divine Computing".

What buying decisions will be based on the openness of cloud resources and common APIs?

Photo credit: tsarkasim, Amsterdam Esogna

Since the announcement went live yesterday about the Google Marketplace, we've had a number of companies come to us about how its applications will fit with the service.

We'll do a fuller look at these companies this week but for some immediate perspective we decided to take a look at Zoho, a service that competes with Google Apps. So it is it interesting that the company joined Google Apps Marketplace in its launch.

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Buy why would Zoho offer its applications to integrate with Google? Yes, the companies compete. But Raju Vegesna of Zoho says that it is far more important to complement Google Apps. Over the past few years the company has worked to make it simple for Zoho customers to use its services in tandem with Google Apps. Zoho offers Google Sign-in, Google Apps Sign-in and recently it integrated with Google Docs.

Vegesna gave us three reasons why Zoho decided to be part of the launch. His perspectives should provide some insights about the symbiotic relationship Google Apps Marketplace will foster.

Extending The Relationship

For many developers, integrating with Google Apps represents a significant business opportunity. Google announced at its launch that it passed the 25 million customer mark over the weekend.

Vegesna:

"First, we have 50% more apps than Google, especially on the business side (CRM, Project Management, Web Conferencing etc). This means, these additional apps can really complement Google Apps. Google has over 20 million users on G Apps and our Business apps can be sold to those customers. "

Google Dominates The Landscape

To play in this era, you have to play with Google. They dominate as much as any company has in the past 30 years. The domination in large part is now solidified by its investment in its cloud infrastructure.

Vegesna:

"Second, we understand that this is going to be a Google dominated eco-system (IBM dominated Mainframe era, Microsoft dominated PC era and Google will dominate the web era) and we wanted to be an important player in this web era. We talked more about this here and here."

A Platform Built On Email, Not CRM

Yesterday, we touched on why the marketplace makes sense for companies standardized on Google Apps. With all the contacts in one place, people can add applications to fine tune Google Apps. Does a company start with the same foundation if the platform is built on CRM?

Vegesna:

"Third, when someone builds a platform, email is a great app to build the platform around, rather than CRM (which salesforce did). We think it'll be a good and succesful platform for online apps which will move the web app momentum forward and we want to be a key player (the same way Adobe was a key player in PC era)."

For more about the Zoho integration:

Google just launched a new Google Labs product for Google Reader: Google Reader Play. Reader Play is a new, highly visual way to browse your Google Reader subscriptions that is somewhat reminiscent of Google's Fast Flip. It replaces the busy Google Reader interface with an interface that focuses on a single story. Whenever a post includes videos or images, Play with highlight these and give you the option to read more of the text as well. This new interface allows you to browse through the feeds you already subscribe to, but Google Reader Play also emphasizes Google Reader's ability to recommend items from around the web for you based on your preferences.

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Big on Recommendations

As Google notes, Play will learn from your preferences, based on the articles you read and "like." You can also choose from a set of categories (tech, entertainment, arts, business, etc.) and Google Reader will create a personalized stream of items just for you. According to Google, Play uses the same algorithm as the Recommended Items feed in Google Reader.

Play will even work if you don't have a Google account. While you can't star, like or share items, you can still browse interesting posts based on the categories you choose. This should make it a good tool for those users who don't want to go through the effort of setting up a feed reader and subscribing to hundreds of different feeds.

Get Started

To use Google Reader Play, just head over here or look for "View in Reader Play" in the folder settings in Google Reader. You can switch stories by using your arrow keys or choose the slideshow mode that will automatically forward to the next story after a few second.

We've all heard of the big company that started as two guys in their garage, but these days, with startup organizations and incubators, more and more success stories seem to feature companies that built their success from group collaboration. One excellent example of how startups can take advantage of collaboration is to work in a coworking environment with other companies and entrepreneurs.

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Tuesday I had the opportunity to chat with Harry Lin, CEO of Lottay, an online gifting service that has spent a large portion of its short history coworking with outside developers and entrepreneurs. Starting in October of last year, the company spent six weeks working in the offices of San Francisco-based Ruby on Rails development house Pivotal Labs. In December they moved into a space at the Ventura Ventures Technology Center where they work alongside other consumer Internet startups, sharing ideas and resources.

"The thing about a startup is that you're always under resourced; you never have enough people," Lin told ReadWriteWeb Tuesday. "So the more you can make out of less, the better off your are, the faster you can go, and a startup is all about speed."

Lin, formerly the Vice President of ABC.com and General Manager of Evite, was brought on board at Lottay after the company received Series A funding in the summer of 2009. Below are some highlights from my discussion with Lin on the benefits of coworking environments for startups.

How did Lottay benefit from the Pivotal Labs experience?
We camped out at the Pivotal Labs office for the entire six weeks. We were in San Francisco and sitting in their office everyday with the two developers that were on our contract. The reason this worked better is that it was very intense and very concentrated; you had no other distractions. The other reason it was fantastic is that its a room full of 25 top notch Ruby on Rails developers. We were only paying for two of them in our engagement, but there were the other 23 sitting in that room working on various things.

We would come up with a problem or a hurdle we couldn't get over and we would just shout out, "Hey has anyone ever done this with a library?" and some guy would jump up and say, "Yeah, I've done that!" Voila! Problem solved. And that would happen all the time. So we were getting the benefit of this very open, huge brain trust that Pivotal had even though, technically speaking, we were just paying for the two guys. The third other thing I'd say was great about the environment is that they had other clients in there. So we got to meet, talk to, and get to know some other Internet companies, and that was really cool."

What is the experience like now in Ventura?
There are 12 of us in this incubator here in the city of Ventura; it's a very deliberate ecosystem the city is trying to push, and we're part of that ecosystem. We all speak the same language, the same jargon, the same shorthand. If one of us comes up with a brilliant idea or an interesting strategic question, we'll grab each other, white board it, sit in a room, chat in the hall way - the kind of random things that happen when you're all physically located in the same place. The other thing that we benefit from is that because this is run by the city, we get a lot of support in the form of a fantastic rate on rent, free wifi, marketing and public relations, and they've helped us find recruits when we have openings to hire people. The city is more than just a landlord, they're trying to jump-start this ecosystem.

So you would suggest that early stage startups try to find coworking space?
If possible, I would not do the "in your basement" or "in your garage by yourself". Those are the legendary stories we like to hear about, but I think the majority of successful startups has had some kind of coworking environment. I worked for nine years in the Bay area and I know that while there are official incubators, there are also these offices where nine out of the ten companies there are high-tech companies. Being with other people who are doing the same thing is hugely beneficial.

In the consumer Internet space, especially with how the Web has evolved over the last decade, everything is getting more social and more open, both in terms of the consumer behavior and in terms of the development and how things are produced. So it just stands to reason that in launching and trying to grow these types of businesses, you should be more social as well.

Is there anything startups should avoid when in a coworking environment?
It is tempting to do a lot of partnerships with other startups because you're there, you know each other, you understand each other's pains and trials and tribulations. Resist the temptation unless is makes a lot of sense. Usually what a startup needs by way of partnership is a large established company.

What is your advice to the young startups out there looking to launch or grow their business?
There will be 100 problems to solve every week. I can guarantee you that at least 75 of those problems have already been experienced and solved by someone else. That's the problem with being in a garage or a bedroom by yourself; you'll probably end up trying to solve those 75 problems yourself. When you're colocated and coworking with other entrepreneurs, you can share. "Oh, you've got that problem? I've got that problem, and here's the solution." You can benefit from their learnings and not have to reinvent the wheel, which saves you a lot of time.

As many in the Twitterverse have dubbed this week, the battle of location based apps continues, as both Gowalla and Foursquare release yet another update to their iPhone apps today. And these are some big guns coming out to accompany the various real-life incentives, contests and whatever else these the two companies can do to take the focus at this year's SXSW.

Both apps are showcasing new design features the companies are calling "fresh" and other such things, and while they surely are, some of these other features are what really stand out.

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Foursquare is surely the less notable in this release, in our opinion, as it's list of new features is shorter and less impressive. It's boasting a faster, more efficient check-in and shout flow, a "Places" view that supports categories, a history view of places you've been and a "pull-to-refresh" feature. These are nothing to sneeze at, but we think Gowalla is releasing some functions that blow these away.

First of all, Gowalla is bringing photos to the location based game, allowing users to upload a photo after checking in. Users can also browse their friends' photos and look at any that have been taken at that specific location.

Next, it's bringing some interactivity to the game, with check-in commenting. When a friend checks in at a place down the street, you don't need to change over to your Twitter client and send them a DM, you can just comment on their check-in. And if you forgot to type a check-in message when you checked in to a spot, you can go back and add it.

In addition to these, Gowalla is bringing out new friend browsing features, enabling you to look through friends, friends of friends, and even their bookmarked spots and trips. With "spot details", including address, phone, Twitter name, Facebook page and website, Gowalla is adding that Yelp (or should I say Foursquare) aspect that was really missing - real world connection information.

And one more feature that may be overloaded next week or may be the talk of the town, "Hot Spots", tells you what the most popular spots near your location are. We haven't had time to really play with it yet, but it sure sounds interesting.

The updates just popped up in the App Store right now so go get updated and let us know what you think - who is going to win the location based battle of SXSW 2010? As far as this round goes, we're calling it for Gowalla.